Re: How do you find any subject in this mess?

Most of us (especially those who participated in the Partner NNTP based NG's) feel exactly the way you do, Hartog.

The designers of the software behind this community (let's give proper credit/blame to those who own and deserve this) - lithium - really have no clue as to how to build out a decent piece of software that can be truly as useful as the NNTP based NG's.

At least 4 or 5 times a week (sometimes more) I'll use my Windows Search Engine and search thru the 100% locally cached copy of the 10+ years of knowledge in the NNTP based partner's ng. Within seconds I'll usually have my answer. Absolutely not true with this lithium based community. It takes tons of time to find things. I saw this early on and started "tagging" practically every post that I make w/at least one or more "keywords". Unfortunately, not many others tag things at all. Being one of the "top taggers" is no privilege or badge of honor. I'd rather be back in the pack.

But tagging is not the answer. lithium needs to do several things to fix this:

A - Allow nntp (or maybe a public posted RESTful web services API) access to the entire contents so that we can download all of the text to a local db for local (and off-line) searching. Just think...getting all of the text into a "nato news server" ;-)

B - an on-line search that can search thru 100% of teh posted text and rank it like a KB (humm like speedsearch - DT Search - does in SalesLogix)

Re: How do you find any subject in this mess?

Agree with you Hartog - would prefer having a few more categories. I always felt we had a very workable and useful number of areas in the News Groups.

One of the things that having specific topic areas is that the subject line of the post has more meaning - with everything so lumped together, you are at the mercy of the people posting to be very specific and lengthy in their subject line, something that many are not very diligent about.